Shoot the bug (a Machine Learning for Kids worksheet)

April 17th, 2024

Students are free to devise their own projects in Machine Learning for Kids, but I also write project worksheets to help inspire students and teachers.

This evening, I’ve written a new worksheet based around regression models. (I wrote about adding support for regression models to the site a couple months ago).

The premise for this project is sort of Space Invaders. Except with only a single Space Invader. And it’s a cute little bug.

The aim of the game is to shoot at the bug.

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Using Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams to restore from a backup cluster

April 12th, 2024

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts sharing examples of ways to use Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams.

Mirror Maker 2 is a powerful and flexible tool for moving Kafka events between Kafka clusters.

For this fifth post, I’ll look at using Mirror Maker to maintain a backup of your Kafka events, and to be able to restore from that backup.

This is more complex than the previous posts as there are multiple stages involved. For each stage, I’ll explain the intent and share the demo script I’ve created to let you try this for yourself.

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Using Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams to create a failover cluster

April 8th, 2024

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts sharing examples of ways to use Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams.

Mirror Maker 2 is a powerful and flexible tool for moving Kafka events between Kafka clusters.

For this fourth post, I’ll look at using Mirror Maker to create an active/passive topology with a backup cluster ready to failover to.

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Using Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams to share topics across multiple regions

April 5th, 2024

This is the third in a series of blog posts sharing examples of ways to use Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams.

Mirror Maker 2 is a powerful and flexible tool for moving Kafka events between Kafka clusters, but sometimes I feel like this can be forgotten if we only talk about it in the context of disaster recovery.

In these posts, I want to inspire you to think about other ways you could use Mirror Maker 2. The best way to learn about what is possible is to play with it for yourself, so with these posts I’ll include a script to create a demonstration of the scenario.

For this third post, I’ll look at using Mirror Maker to create logical topics shared across multiple regions.

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How ML for Kids handles numbers models now

April 4th, 2024

I’m on vacation for the Easter holidays this week. Apparently I don’t know how vacations work, so I’ve spent a lot of the last six days working on a major rewrite of a big chunk of Machine Learning for Kids. In this post, I want to describe what I’ve been doing and why.

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Using Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams to broadcast events to multiple regions

April 2nd, 2024

This is the second in a series of blog posts sharing examples of ways to use Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams.

Mirror Maker 2 is a powerful and flexible tool for moving Kafka events between Kafka clusters, but sometimes I feel like this can be forgotten if we only talk about it in the context of disaster recovery.

In these posts, I want to inspire you to think about other ways you could use Mirror Maker 2. The best way to learn about what is possible is to play with it for yourself, so with these posts I’ll include a script to create a demonstration of the scenario.

For this second post, I’ll look at using Mirror Maker to broadcast events to clusters in multiple regions.

Where the last post described a “fan in” scenario, this is effectively the opposite use case: a “fan out” scenario.

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Using Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams to aggregate events across regions

March 30th, 2024

This is the first in a series of blog posts sharing examples of ways to use Mirror Maker 2 with IBM Event Streams.

Mirror Maker 2 is a powerful and flexible tool for moving Kafka events between Kafka clusters, but sometimes I feel like this can be forgotten if we only talk about it in the context of disaster recovery.

In these posts, I want to inspire you to think about other ways you could use Mirror Maker 2. The best way to learn about what is possible is to play with it for yourself, so with these posts I’ll include a script to create a demonstration of the scenario.

For this first post, I’ll look at using Mirror Maker to aggregate events across clusters in multiple regions.

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Accelerating your event-driven projects with AsyncAPI 3

March 21st, 2024

Demonstrating some of the first tools to support AsyncAPI v3, and how they can help accelerate your event-driven projects.

AsyncAPI version 3 was released in December 2023. In this post, I want to share some of the things that you can do with AsyncAPI v3 documents, with a demonstration of:

  • Event Endpoint Management
    Download AsyncAPI documents for Kafka topics shared for reuse
    AsyncAPI v3 support added in version 11.1.1 (Dec 2023)
  • AsyncAPI java-template
    Generate complete Java projects from AsyncAPI documents
    AsyncAPI v3 support added in version 0.3.0 (Mar 2024)
  • Microcks
    Generate Kafka topics with mock data from AsyncAPI documents
    AsyncAPI v3 support added in version 1.9.0 (Mar 2024)

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